ADDA – Society Accounting/Management Software thrives on SMS via Exotel

What is the change you seek to bring in the way Apartment Complexes and Housing Flat systems work?

We stand by transparency and feel that is the best way to enable a management committee of any housing complex to transition learning’s, processes, and accounts/documentation. When a new management committee comes into charge, earlier, they would spend all the time in setting up policies, rules, gather data and run the wheel again. Now with ADDA they are able to focus efforts on more pro-active initiatives that help the complex/society and its residents bond, gel and feel together such as cultural nights, rainwater harvesting (which is a major problem in Bangalore) and growth of gardening, beautification of the complexes.
The idea is to leave the operational day-day issues in an auto-pilot mode and focus your energies on more innovative solutions and initiatives.

What challenge did you face and how has Exotel as a solution helped especially over SMS to your daily requirements?

We required a good SMS Gateway provider who would be stable and provide dependable service. With most recent TRAI guidelines constantly changing, we also wanted to be aware of what is changing and why, and we saw a good solution with Exotel around SMS.
Our Management Committees have constant SMS updates that they wish to send out to the residents of these complexes and the Exotel API allow us to enable Transactional & Promotional SMS via the fixed templates for these committees. There was an elderly man once with Parkinson’s disease who was lost, but with a nice SMS blast, people were able to find, locate and bring him back to his home. It really makes the life of these committee managers much easier to inform all the residents of the updates regarding water, electricity, billing and much more.

How has the Incoming SMS solution on a single virtual phone number worked?

Ah, yes – that’s a killer feature that we use. In almost every Residential Community, there is a percentage of Users who are not very web-savvy. If they wish to raise an issue to their Association’s management committee then they are able to send an SMS to the Exotel Incoming SMS phone number.

We use the SMS App builder and the API to now send the SMS, this message gets posted in the correct ADDA, and then the Estate Manager or someone from the Management Committee can channel it to the right technician.

We plan to use the IVR solution soon too, and have some ideas around that too, but so far it’s been a great experience and we share some of those changes in pricing /guidelines around SMS via your blogs to our customers as well. It helps keep everything in the open and transparent, just like how we like it.